Entity SEO: how to make Google and AI sure who you are

Entity SEO is making search engines and AI systems sure what your company is, and that every mention of it refers to the same thing. Google has organised its understanding of the web around entities, “things, not strings”, since 2012. With AI assistants writing answers about companies, being an unambiguous entity has gone from a nice extra to the ground everything else stands on.

What entity SEO is

Keyword SEO asks whether a page matches the words someone typed. Entity SEO asks whether a search engine knows which thing you are, and trusts what it knows. “Mercury” could be a planet, an element, a car brand or a bank; a company called Acme is one of hundreds. The work is making sure that when Google or an AI assistant meets your name, it connects it to the right entity and the right facts.

Google’s Knowledge Graph

Sources^[1][8][2].

Knowledge graph SEO is about getting your entity into it accurately. Knowledge panels, the boxes of facts beside some results, are drawn from it. Google says they “are automatically generated, and information that appears in a knowledge panel comes from various sources across the web”, with updates from the entities themselves and user feedback^[3]. Developers can query it through the Knowledge Graph Search API, though Google warns it is “not suitable for use as a production-critical service”^[5].

Check your entity’s consistency

The first test is simple and almost nobody runs it: do your own profiles agree? A different founding year on Crunchbase, a different company name on LinkedIn, a different city on a directory. Each is small; together they tell a machine it may be looking at two companies.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Example Inc.",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "description": "Invoicing software",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example",
    "https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/example"
  ]
}
</script>

Organization schema and sameAs

Google says Organization structured data on your homepage “can help Google better understand your organization’s administrative details and disambiguate your organization in search results”. Its sameAs property is “the URL of a page on another website with additional information about your organization”, such as a social or review profile, and you can list several^[4].

The schema markup generator builds Organization JSON-LD with a logo and every profile. If you are wondering whether a Wikipedia article is the next step, read how to create a Wikipedia page first: it has a much higher bar than most companies expect.

Entity SEO and semantic SEO

Semantic SEO is the page-level cousin: covering the meaning of a topic and the questions around it, rather than repeating one keyword. The two work together. A page that names its entities clearly, links them to the right references and answers the related questions is easier to understand for Google’s query fan-out and for any model reading it. The topical authority post covers the coverage side.

Entities and AI answers

Google is direct that there is no special markup for its AI features: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode”^[6], and “structured data isn’t required for generative AI search”^[7]. So entity SEO for AI is not a markup trick. It is making sure that whatever a model reads about you, on your site, your profiles and other people’s pages, describes the same company with the same facts.

Questions people ask

Sources